Mendix Cloud Updates in Q1 2016

Over the last few weeks we’ve introduced some new functionality to the Mendix Cloud, and in the coming months we’ll make a couple of additional major changes. Keep on reading to find out which great changes await you.

Legacy Sandboxes

Since October 2015, all newly created apps in our Free Tier have been the new Free Apps. The previous generation of our Free Tier (sandboxes) has been kept available, but on June 1st 2016 we will migrate all legacy sandboxes to the new Free Apps. All existing data will be copied and the app will be moved to a new URL that ends with .mxapps.io. This requires you to upgrade your app to Mendix 6. All applicable technical contacts will receive communication of this via email.

Backups for Free Apps

In the turbulent beta phase of Backups for Free Apps we found more problems than we were comfortable with releasing. After sorting out the issues one by one, the Backups for Free Apps are now available for all Free Apps.

Technical Contacts

The Technical Contact is responsible for the operational part of the production environment and our primary contact for communication about upcoming changes, reboots and other operational issues. However, we recently discovered that about 40% of all Technical Contacts in our paid plans were not subscribed to app alerts. This resulted in undetected problems on production environments that could easily have been avoided. We will start with automatically subscribing the Technical Contact to alerts on production environments.

If you are the Technical Contact of an application and want to transfer your rights to someone else, you can now do this at the Node Security tab. As expected, this change requires two-factor-authentication.

Advanced Settings

We have made the majority of custom runtime settings available for configuration on your environment. This allows expert users tweak for example:

Pinning Client Certificates to Web Service calls

It is now possible to inform the Mendix Runtime which Client Certificates are to be used for specific Web Service calls when more than one Client Certificate is loaded. This is only required under specific circumstances, where multiple Client Certificates are signed by the same CA and one is accepted while the other is not.

Temporary files

Starting on April 1st 2016 we will empty the temporary files folder whenever an application is stopped. This will help in keeping disk usage under control, as in some situations temporary files are not cleaned up properly.

Detailed build job output

In both our free and paid tiers we’ve made the build output available for debugging purposes. When your project contains errors or can not be built for any other reason, you can now find the details under Build Output.